Recent reviews by Timemaster2000

An excellent game about building swords. I've made it through what's released of the main story so far and I'm eagerly awaiting more. The sword building surprisingly deep despite using a relatively small set of simple modifications. It kind of scratches the same itch as building with legos in weird sort of way. It's not perfect yet since it's still early access but it's certainly heading in the right direction. Please add a way to toggle on mirrored controls for quillons, I know they're supposed to be inherently modular, but sometimes I just want a custom guard with symmetrical bends. Also it would be nice to have an imperial units toggle, as my dumb American brain cannot comprehend the majesty of the metric system.

Let me sing this games' praises with an anecdote. A friend of mine has over 150 hours in this game and multiple playthroughs. Today I was able to tell him new information about the game that he didn't know because he missed it. As far as I can tell there are only two sources for this information which I happened to stumble upon in my playthrough. The actions I took based off of this info has changed the fate of a small area of the game and has sent it down a different course than what most players will encounter. They simply don't make games like this anymore.

When I found this game it had already been out for a year and I was legitimately mad that I had missed it. I'd been looking for a game similar to this for a long time.

-Story

The story was surprisingly one of the strongest aspects in my opinion. There's a lot of little details that I had chalked up to poor internal consistency or had taken for granted as background dressing world building only for it later to be revealed that these things were done intentionally to fit the larger narrative. Additionally, there were many twists that actually caught me off guard. I wish I could go into more detail, but I would hate to spoil anything by giving specific examples, since it's much more rewarding to experience them without prior knowledge.

-Progression

The game has multiple avenues for progression that all lead to your character feeling more and more powerful with each chapter that goes by.

Each chapter will bring new equipment that's more powerful than the best stuff you could obtain in the last chapter. Some of this equipment you can just buy, but a majority of it will need to be crafted using unique drops from enemies in the area. On top of that every piece of equipment has it's own EXP bar that will unlock a reward when you've killed enough enemies. This encourages you to use every piece of equipment you get in order to unlock all the rewards.

These rewards are most often new skills that you can equip to change how you play. These skills all have a point cost to equip and you can gain more of these points from completing equipment or finding them throughout the world. This allows a large degree of customization through deciding which skills are more or less valuable to you, and how you want to distribute your points.

On top of the gear grind there is a sort of unlockable tree that lets get small stat increments by spending different colored essences you get from killing monsters. This tree also has larger rewards such as new magic and equipment to work towards. Because you need different colored essences to unlock new nodes there are times where you might be unable to progress the tree even though you have thousands of essence in the wrong color. The game gives you the option to spend 3x the cost of the node to use whatever color of essence you have the most of instead. This lets you keep working on that tree even if you're short on a node or two so you can get to the ones that you do have the right color for.

All of this comes together to make for an enjoyable progression with some very light grinds to get new unlockables. I think the worst I had to do was an hour or two max for some of the areas that I went through too quickly.

-Combat

You know how some games have combat that doesn't really get good until you're about a third of the way through the game? That is not the case here. From the first swing of your stick, the game has a combat that flows well and rewards high risk gameplay. You can use slow hit and run tactics to whittle down enemies, but that's not gonna build up your combo. In the top right is a combo counter that increase with every hit and goes away once you haven't hit an enemy for a few seconds. Once the combo gets high enough you start earning small buffs such as 1.2x damage or enemies dropping
extra gold with each hit, and you'll lose these if you drop the combos. This leads to trying to clear a full screen of enemies without stopping until there's nothing left to hit in order to maximize that combo counter.

You also get new attacks given to you throughout the first half of the game or so and each of these have varying degrees of usefulness. For instance an early skill is an attack that launches both you and the enemy into the air and tends to be the a staple in any combo chain. Another is a shield dash that I've only ever used by accident and has gotten me killed multiple times. Thankfully I'm not forced to suffer with that new move that I hate, since the game allows you to pay a small price to lock the skill so it can't be activated. These skills can be unlocked at any time if you end up changing your mind and want it back.

The magic has it's own button in combat and allows you to equip one spell from each element at a time. You select which spell you want to cast by putting in a two input directional combination. All of your spells will either grant you a temporary shield or turn you into a creature that can't be harmed for the duration of the spell. On lower difficulties time will also stop as long as you're holding down the magic button giving you plenty of time to pick the best spell for the situation. On higher difficulties this is taken away from you and enemies will continue attacking you while you're tying to activate your spell.

Finally the combat has this amazing hitstun that makes your hits feel very impactful. Seeing everything stop and give a small moment to plan your next move feels awesome and adds a ton of weight to every strike. Combine this with moves that hit many times in rapid succession and it causes what I can only call "neuron activation."

There's a total of 6 difficulty options and you can freely move between the 3 easier ones at any point in your playthrough. The harder 3 require you to lock in after the first chapter, and you will only be able to move the difficulty down from there on. Normal gave me plenty of a challenge for a first playthrough but I've since started a new file on Impossible and it certainly lives up to it's name.

-Conclusion

The game is jam packed full of content and rewards you for interacting with every aspect of it. The gameplay strikes a perfect balance between player progression and player skill, and asks you to work on both in order to progress through the story. According to my save files, my first playthrough took 56 hours, but that doesn't count all the times I died and was sent back to my last save. If memory serves me Steam showed a total of ~70 hours when I was finally done. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of progression grinds or is interested in a 2D DMC style combat.

Fun, but the game's a bit too easy for a rogue-lite. I was able to beat the game on my second run, and most of the bosses only have two attack patterns, one for their first phase and one for their second. Where the game really has potential is the emergent game play from all the spells you have access to.

Bad game

The learning curve is short and quick. Once you take out that first boss, you're halfway there.

If you ever played King of Thieves, it's like that, but without pay to win features.

The shapes and lines blur together. To any onlooker it looks as if I'm pressing buttons randomly, and moving about erratically and without thought. Inside though, my brain is taking in data at a frightening speed. I need only a moment to look at a puzzle and understand the exact path needed to solve it. As I've already begun moving my brain is optimizing my movement on the fly.I'm juggling programs left and right in order to maximize my efficiency, as soon as a power bar is available it is already being dedicated to the next task. Before long everything else fades away, my room, the screen, the controller in my hands. Before long even the notion of the self begins to fade away, and I morph into yet another program in the deck.

10/10 Would hack again

Speedrunning for normies

This was already the best game ever, and now it has graphics.

You don't have any more excuses, buy the game.